Great Smokies Writing Program Classes

Instructor: Jay Aelick
In-person in Asheville (location TBD)

3 sessions: Sept. 8, 15, & 22, 6:30-8:30pm
Cost: $150

What makes us want to sit with the speaker of a poem as they turn over ideas, situations, and worries that may seem to have little to do with us? In Poetry as Persuasion, Carl Dennis argues that in order to encourage readers to engage with the themes of our poetry, we must construct speakers “whose company is worth keeping.” Join us in conversation with the speakers of poets including Henri Cole, Alan Shapiro, and Diane Seuss as we develop strategies for crafting speakers passionate about their subject matter, who ponder it from multiple perspectives, and who invite the reader into the tension of the work, making it relevant to their life as well.

The class will include in-class writing exercises, and you’ll have the opportunity to share and receive feedback on two or three of your poems.

Jay Aelick is a nonbinary writer and critic. They hold an MFA from North Carolina State University and are a former Fulbright Austria Teaching Assistant and fellow of German Literary Institutions: The Berlin Seminar (GLIB). Their work can be found in The Journal, Kestrel, Poetry South, Okay Donkey, International Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Aelick makes up one half of the St. Balasar University English Club Podcast, where real critics at a fake university analyze the internet’s most infamous books.

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Instructor: Jacqui Castle
In-person at UNC Asheville

Sat., Nov. 7, 10:00am–4:00pm (with lunch break)
Cost: $100

The setting of a story is more than simply a backdrop. Whether it’s a far-off fantasy kingdom, a bustling city, a patch of forest, or a small town in middle America, a place can influence your characters tremendously. It can serve as a trap they need to escape, a home they yearn for, a catalyst for memories, or an ally that needs protection. In speculative fiction, a place may even be its own character with motivations and desires—think of the sentient Overlook Hotel in The Shining or the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin.

Emotions are tied to place, and by viewing your setting as an element of the story that deserves all the love and attention of a supporting character, and its own arc, you can build a world that not only influences your protagonist but also your readers. Just like your characters, places are not static. Through a variety of generative, prompt-based exercises, we will explore our settings, allowing them to change and grow, and leave with a firm grasp of their power over our stories.

Jacqui Castle is the author of the novel The Seclusion, which garnered Castle the title of 2020 Indie Author of the Year through the Indie Author Project (a collaboration between Library Journal and Biblioboard). The 2022 sequel The Chasm was hailed as “Not only necessary in school libraries but also a solid choice for a class read” by School Library Journal. Jacqui is the proud owner of Lit Local Mini Bookshops, which brings the work of local authors to Asheville establishments.

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Instructor: Tamara Federici
CRN: 60406
Meets in-person in Asheville (location TBD)
5 weeks
Saturdays, 12:00–2:30pm
Sept. 19–Oct. 17

What better way to stick it to the man than by actively learning about comedy in a time of chaos and despair? Humor is an art form we can study to strengthen our funny bones and our resilience! We can laugh while learning about power imbalances. We can study underrepresented points of view while learning what our own comedic voice sounds like. We’ll discuss the tools and the places comedy winds its way through to make a point, including: Satire, Mockumentary, Absurdity, Truth to Power, and Social Commentary. We’ll discover how the life cycle of a joke or essay works. And we’ll write funny short work both individually and as a group.

How do you write hilarious pieces while the horrific is happening? And how much do you incorporate into your work? See how other writers and artists have traversed this path. We’ll study the how and why. Your words have power. Come explore how comedy is adept at creating connection while pointing out and puncturing facades. Plus, it’s fun! All levels are welcome.

Instructor: Tiana Kennell
CRN: 60642
Meets online via Zoom
5 weeks
Tuesdays, 6:00–8:30pm
Sept. 22–Oct. 20

Collect and retell the stories of your family, life, and community. In this course, students will receive guidance on unearthing lesser-known stories and preserving history through interviews and narrative writing. In-class and at-home assignments will include conducting conversations with strangers, loved ones, and neighbors, then transforming the information and anecdotes into creative pieces that can be shared, kept for personal record-keeping, used in a memoir, or passed down to the next generations. Students will also practice writing original tribute-style obituaries and living legacies.

Each week will combine brief examples, craft discussion, and guided generative work, with optional sharing/feedback. By the end of the course, students will leave with multiple short experiments and at least one more developed piece (or a strong start on a larger project), along with a practical toolkit for continuing.

Instructor: Brit Washburn
CRN: 60850
Meets in-person in Asheville (location TBD)
5 weeks
Saturdays, 3:00–5:30pm
Sept. 26–Oct. 24

In this generative workshop, we’ll explore artists’ statements, the ars poetica, manifestos, and self-portrait poems both philosophically and as literary forms. We’ll read selections by Maggie Queeney, Denise Duhamel, Archibald MacLeish, James Baldwin, Joyce Sutphen, Diane Seuss, Edward Hirsch, Kimiko Hahn, and Evie Shockley, among others. We’ll take these writers and their works as models, and begin to consider what our bodies of work are “similar to,” what they “often employ” (aspirationally or in fact), what our work is and/or what we hope it to become. We’ll consider the form or forms our work takes or might take, how our identities and backgrounds might inform our work, what we are “drawn to” and “interested in,” and what we believe a poem (story, essay) should (or should not) do/be. We’ll consider who we are and what we do in addition to or apart from writing: what we love, what we do not like, and what we “insist on.” We’ll explore what we “must do” and what our responsibilities are—as artists and otherwise. Whether a fledgling or seasoned writer, these reflective exercises will support you in orienting yourself according to where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going as an artist.

Brit Washburn is the author of the essay collection Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2023) and the poetry collections Notwithstanding (2019) and What Is Given (2025), both from Wet Cement Press. She teaches at Virginia Tech and co-curates the Juniper Bends reading series. She also serves as Associate Editor for Criticism and Interviews at The Great Smokies Review and as Nonfiction Editor at Only Poems, to which she contributes regularly. Recently, her work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, The Christian Century, and the anthology Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Floods.

Instructor: Jacquelyn Nasti
CRN: 60545
Meets at Hanger Hall School in Asheville
5 weeks
Mondays, 6:30–9:00pm
Sept. 28–Oct. 26

Instructor: Elliot Reed
CRN: 60851
Meets in-person at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center
10 weeks
Wednesdays, 7:00–9:30pm
Sept. 2–Nov. 4

This workshop promises that you will leave with a draft of a novel. Your first novel? Maybe yes, maybe no, but probably your first fragmented novel.

This course will include a major focus on creativity practice. Weekly exercises and prompts will reduce writing anxiety and build an atmosphere of creativity in the workshop space. Course material will help us read through the “ephemeralist” lens. We will find ephemera and write ephemera to take the pressure off of the product. Someone said, “Short stories are like wild animals that come out of the woods at night. You must learn not to scare them away.”
Earth is an overgrown heap of accidental writing and this course asks you to plunder and mine for overlooked things.

The short story, the poem, and the novel dominate published literature, but what else can literature be? Nothing is as exciting to read as a hand-written love note found torn and discarded in the landscaping. Find one note and write its replies, write more replies, and you have two fictional lives. In this course we will produce literature in unconventional forms. We will write epistolary stories, stories found on grocery lists, stories made by astronomers tracking and recording the movements of celestial bodies… If you have a short story or novel you are working on, you will be encouraged to bring in pages for workshop. Students will produce new work each session and leave with a finished work composed of fragments.

We will have some special guests, including Chelsea Martin, author of Caca Dolce, whom Lena Dunham has called the “preeminent chronicler of Internet age malaise.”

Elliot Reed is an author and teacher whose work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Panacea Review, and Little Star, among other places. His debut novel, A Key to Treehouse Living (Tin House, 2018) was shortlisted for a Mark Twain Award. He lives in East Asheville with his wife, son, and small dog.

Instructor: Savannah Brooks
CRN: 61196
Meets in-person at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center
10 weeks
Mondays*, 6:30–9:00pm
*except the first session, which will meet on Tues. the 8th due to Labor Day
Sept. 8–Nov. 9

Breaking down the publishing landscape into three sectors, this course focuses on the logistics, best approaches, and necessary materials for landing your work at literary and entertainment magazines; small, independent, and university presses; and traditional, hybrid, and self publishers. Each student will leave with drafts of two book reviews, a cover letter, an author bio, a short-form pitch, a short-form submission-ready piece, a query letter and/or long-form proposal, and the first page of a long-form work, all of which can and should be used as templates going forward.

That said, this class will be more lecture- and feedback-based than generative. Students will workshop their short-form work two separate times and the first page of a longer work once. They can expect to receive both written and verbal feedback from fellow students and from the instructor.

Savannah Brooks earned her BS in marketing management from Virginia Teach and her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. She spent the first decade of her career working on literary magazines, at small and hybrid presses, and as a literary agent. In this time, she taught creative writing, publishing, and literature courses at Hamline, the University of Minnesota, and the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. After contracting a disabling case of long COVID, she relocated to Asheville, North Carolina, where she teaches at the Flatiron Writers Room and the Great Smokies Writing Program and works as a reviewer for The Independent Book Review. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Red Rock Review, Scuba Diving Magazine, Prime Number Magazine, and Calyx, among more than a dozen other publications, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award.

Instructor: Tim Earley
CRN: 61197
Meets in-person at Grace Episcopal Church
10 weeks
Sundays, 3:00–5:30pm
Sept. 6–Nov. 8

The term “nature poetry” perhaps conjures up notions of description-laden odes, idealized pastoral scenes, and Romantic pronouncements about the poet’s “oneness” with their surroundings. While there are doubtless sterling examples of these kinds of poems, the tradition of nature writing in Appalachia is far more complex, examining a host of environmental and philosophical issues—environmental degradation, resource extraction, climate change, stewardship, and the complex, deeply embedded, ever-changing relationship between the individual subject and/or society in relation to what we might call “nature.”

In this course, we’ll write poems that attempt to examine nature in its full complexity, with the abiding caveat that this is almost certainly a complexity we are not fully able to grasp. That gap can be where things get interesting.

In addition to weekly writing prompts and discussions of student poems, we’ll read a variety of Appalachian nature writing and ecopoetic texts. Required texts are bell hooks’ An Appalachian Elegy, Maurice Manning’s Bucolics, Jonathan Williams’ Jubilant Thicket, and Wendell Berry’s The Mad Farmer Poems. These texts will be supplemented with reading packets provided by the instructor, which will include a wide range of Appalachian writing about nature and some theoretical underpinnings for the course, including Arne Naess’s concept of deep ecology and Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology.